Copasetic Flow

  Carbon-fiber masts don’t have to be the villain. For Straight Key Month I ran a quarter-wave 20-meter vertical two ways—first with 12-gauge wire taped to the outside of a Goture carbon-fiber mast, then with 18-gauge magnet wire laced inside the mast. Result: both versions delivered S9 into Utah from downtown San Francisco, and the internal-wire build was far stealthier for city operating. I finally got to do a long term—a few hours—test of the TouCans and a Stick vertical antenna with magnet wire on the inside this week! The interior magnet wire setup worked just as well as the same antenna rigged with 12 gauge wire taped to the outside of the carbon fiber mast did. The rig was S9 into the Utah SDR that morning. Here's a look at the antenna setup and results. There are more text details below the video.. Construction To construct the antenna I removed the brass bottom of the carbon mast, removed the upermost segment, and then inserted 18 guague magnet wire through the...

 An AM broadcast station was loud in my headphones for about two minutes. Then, TouCans mysterious noise cacnellation circuit charged, and the POTA was off and running. According to the POTA website, I haven't activated US-0757 , aka the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park , in about eight months. It was nice to be back! We'd had about a week's worth of atomspheric river rains, so it was pretty phenomenal to have this view during the activation. The temperature was in the low 60s which was very pleasant. I didn't go for a swim this time, but I'm going to get back to that soon as well. View of the Golden Gate Bridge from over my shoulder The transit ride—SF MUNI 54 to BART to San Francisco MUNI 30—was a piece of cake as always. The video below shows part of the route as seen from the bus window. I just now realized that I copied my opeining into the video twice. You didn't imagine it. Sorry about that :) I stopped for lunch at the Buena Vista I...

 I made a run to New Mexico a few weeks ago. I took the chance to attempt POTA activations from Ciblola National Forest, Lincoln National Forest, and a few other places I'll talk about later this week. My first activation in Cibloa National Forest the day I arrived in Albuquerque was by far my most successful in terms of raw QSO count. Having just arrived in town, I of course made my way to Blake's Lottaburger for a green chili cheeseburger. I've been trying to reduce my food intake a bit so I ordered an itsaburger as opposed to a lottaburger. (Seriously. It's an excellent naming scheme, no pun intended.) Next, I made my way out to Simms Park. The park is operated by the city of Albuquerque, but it's completely contained within the boundaries of Cibola National Forest, US-4514 , so voila. I taped the Project TouCan's vertical antenna on its carbon fiber support mast to a wooden railing post and got to work. I've found several references warning not to u...

  After contacting Alaska from San Francisco on 14.0574 MHz with 5 watts power delivered via a 1/4 wave vertical antenna through an apartment highrise last week, I started building models of HF propagation around buildings. This culminated in several new tools that I'll be discussing in more depths in future posts and the propagation map you can interact with towards the bottom of the page. What's in the Map Radio Contact Paths The map shows the QSOs (radio contacts) I made from the park on the top of One Maritime Plaza . Each contact is mapped out by a solid line running along the ground as well as a likely path the high frequency radio signal took as it bounced off the ionosphere on its way to the receiving station. I've talked about mapping F2 bounces before .  Fun F2 paths near a moutain outside El Paso, TX The paths in the map below use the maximum F2 layer height of the ionosphere at the time of the contact as it was reported by NOAA Glotec data . If you'd like t...

  While analyzing the skip path of a a 5-watt QSO I made last week from the San Francisco to Argentina with Project TouCans, I stumbled across a set of NOAA resources that completely changed how I look at ionospheric conditions. From real-time aurora dashboards to animated MUF forecasts and electron flux data, these tools offer hams powerful insights into propagation—and some surprises along the way. I made a grey line QSO from the campus of City College San Francisco to Argentina with our 5-watt Project TouCans rig last week. Last night, KO6BTY and I found ourselves deep in the rabbit hole of ionospheric conditions. What started as curiosity about the Kp index and whether aurora activity might have influenced the QSO's skip path, led us to discover some powerful NOAA resources. From aurora dashboards and global ionosphere forecasts to animated MUF predictions and GOES electron flux data, these tools give ham radio operators new ways to understand HF propagation, F2 layer behavior...

  Live portable ham radio from San Francisco’s Presidio with a clean take-off toward the Pacific. Route via PresidiGo, light wire vertical, and a crystal-locked 14.0574 MHz start. I keep local times in the story; the QSO map is in UTC. I arrived downtown at Embarcadero Station at 15:20 PST yesterday with Project Toucans , a portable ham radio. There was a newly married couple, still in their dress and tux, waiting to ride the cable car up towards California and Powell. I was waiting for the PresidiGo bus out to the Presidio. It's a free bus out to the park that passes through downtown several times a day. I hopped on the bus at 4 PM downtown. After a few stops at 4:07 PM PST, the bus was completely full. Interestingly, when we arrived at the first Presidio stop at 4:15, almost everyone got off and exited the Presidio back towards town. I don't know why. The bus winded through the rest of the Presidio towards the transit center. The center is right in front of the new park, cal...

 There's been a lot of talk about what is and isn't homebrew lately. I started hearing the all-in-good-fun contention around the Soldersmoke DC Receiver Challenge . A few days back, the conversation wandered over to the comments section of a HackaDay post. In that post, I found the following quote from The Tao of Programming :  "When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas." While it's cobbled together from modified kits, TouCans, suspended in its dipole beneath a Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory rain shield, will always sit in my heart as a manifestation of "the simplest harmony between machine and ideas" That makes me wonder if there should be a catetory known as a homebrew system. Sure, TouCans has kits, but they're modded to fit the application. They're also powered and controlled by a homebrew Darlington array buffered momentary contact relay (keyer) and a latching relay (power),...